If The Euro Fails, Europe Fails: Hurrah!

ANGELA Merkel tells us that if the euro fails then Europe fails: to which the correct response is Hurrah!

Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel today warned that the failure of the euro would lead to the fall of Europe as she outlined a plan to bail out Greece’s stricken economy.

However, rather sadly, this isn’t in fact true. If the euro fails it does not mean the failure of Europe, nor even of the European Union. It means just the failure of a particular idea of it. Sadly here can be a matter of taste of course: I’m so eurosceptic I’ve even stood as a UKIP candidate, a position that I’m aware quite a lot of you won’t share.

If the euro does fail, in the sense that Greece or any other country has to leave it, then the first and most obvious version of Europe that fails is one in which things only ever move forward. That’s something that would rather please those like me of course: for it’s one of the basic ideas that when something has become a “European competence” then it shall remain so forever. There is to be no sending powers back to the nation states, power can only be concentrated at the centre.

The second version and one probably more damaging to the project, is that we’ll finally have seen, have irrefutable proof of, the point that the technocrats at the centre do not always know what they’re doing. And given that the system depends on those bureaucrats knowing what they are doing before they tell the 500 million of us what to do, that’s a heavy blow to the project.

All of this is of course why they’re all planning to spend so much of our money on rescuing their pet project. If we are able to see that they’ve cocked up on this then we’re rather likely to look askance at their next bright idea, whatever it is. And that would never do at all: our job is just to do as we’re told, isn’t it?